Survivors

Thursday, April 14, 2011

The "Problem" With Pink.

I can't count the ways this is an overreaction. But perhaps its a worthwhile exercise in gender to try:

Much the way a 5 year old playing "Daphne dress up" on Halloween is no indication of a person's sexuality later on, painting a boy's toenails is not an automatic correlation with "the Gay". These are children. Gender roles, while powerful, are the first lessons many in a society learn...and every child experiments with the concepts as they are socialized into them. Many play, house and engage in role taking, emulate what they presume their parents roles to be etc. The "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" biological deterministic explanation for behavior is so grossly overestimated that its incredibly difficult for most people to tell where "Nature" begins and where social expectations/prescription ends. Hair length, apropriate style and length of clothing, norms associated with one gender or the other... socially perscribed and variable cross-culturally. If gender roles and behavior were fixed and inflexible (and if they were purely biological hardwiring) they'd be constant over human history. Our ideas on gender and gender identity vary from culture to culture and are incredibly subjective. Nail polish and the liking of a particular color has little bearing on a person's identity until society makes it so. The rabid associations being made in the media, and in the rest of society about boys and masculinity does a great to shape (and punish) "deviant" behavior and perpetuate homophobia. The vigor with which many seem to react to gender deviance underscores how pervasive adhering to gender roles are in our dear patriarchy. Boys doing anything remotely percieved as feminine is considered a loss of power. And given how much emphasis we attach to masculinity in our culture, its almost incomprehensible that any boy would want to "give up" his power...so it becomes something that is done to him, or something his mother is responsible for in some Oedipal assumption...our society clings so strongly to gender typing that it finds this MINOR deviation at the age of five enough of a white knuckle panic attack that it launches a quick and decisive counterattack. On a 5 year old... clearly everyone's lost their minds.

This sort of histrionic terror of "feminization of boys" is rooted in Cold War Lavender scare propaganda and the people (over)reacting to this? Sad hangovers from this rigid socialization. Gender roles are very much just that. Which means they're negotiable and culturally defined. Not every boy has to play with guns and despise pink to identify as masculine. Its safe to come out of those bomb shelters and unclench already. There really are bigger problems in the world than a boy with pink nailpolish. What with the still record high unemployment rates, and this budget everyone seems quite content to feud over, you'd think we could find more important things to concern ourselves with collectively. Funny thing, those priorities.

UPDATE: Given the extreme importance of...everybody chiming in on how a mother raises her 5 year old. The View, and the perpetually clever Jon Stewart add their 22 cents.

6 comments:

Its a little absurd to think that entire ranges of colors are off limits to boys/men lest the channel some sort of big gay demon to inhabit them. The liking of a color has as little bearing to the sexual identity of a boy or person as the painting of toenails do. Butttt... half of our population still seems quite content clinging to superstitions and ridiculously uneducated assumptions about gender. Sadly, to the ruin of many.

@Ian- Rock out, man. I say we "take back" the color pink, the same way slightly silly Xtianists have tried to take back the rainbow. That way people in generations to come won't have aneurysms when a boy happens to ...like a color that isn't socially prescribed. Its official. People are idiots.

My favorite color is a shade of blue. If it's ridiculous to suggest that I should avoid wearing blue because I have a vagina, why can't a little boy paint any part of himself any color he wants?

Spawn's favorite t-shirt is pink and it THRILLS me right down to the ground that my parents, at least, have come far enough along to know not to broach the subject with me or Spawn. (Small victories. ;)) What my parents and their generation will never understand is that I couldn't give a rat's ass less if Spawn does discover some day that he's gay after I've spent years buying him dolls and an Easy Bake Oven and accessories...as long as he finds a way to make me a grandmother eventually. ;)

@Chrissi- First I commend you for your nonchalance about this. Its exactly the reaction I'd like to see from more parents terrified that their children will burst in to flames if their boys admit to liking pink. I've had colleagues tell me stories about the only time fathers get involved with kindergarten aged boys at teacher confrences is when they feel they have an "unhealthy" interest in art or might need "toughening up". Otherwise, hands off the wheel. Its a dull, sad commentary.

Honorable Mention.

"Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit social convenience. I don't believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others."- Coretta Scott King

"So, what have we learned? We have learned the first lesson. They will always hate us...we must give ordinary humans respect, compliance and understanding. And we must never mistake that for trust." Emma Frost, Astonishing X-Men #1

"I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. " Ralph Ellison

"The X-men will continue to fight for a word that fears and hates them...but we will never be victims again." - Cyclops- Uncanny X-Men #1